Remember, remember the 4th of November, it’s the day the legal profession took leave of its senses. Hopefully temporarily but certainly noticeably. It was perhaps unsurprising. It is not often that a constitutional law case which could help define our political future appears on the front of our national newspapers with such a barrage of fireworks. It is easy to be drawn in by the pretty explosions.

The 3rd November marked a win in the High Court for a wealthy fund manager, Gina Miller. This modern-day Guy Fawkes placed her barrels of gun powder directly under the Government, rather than Parliament this time. Her explosive case determined that the Government had no right to trigger Art 50 and inform the EU of the UK’s desire to leave without a vote in Parliament. The sparks from the case caused explosions across the press, with the Mail and the Sun calling the three judges who took the decision ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people.’

Many parts of the State remained without power for days and thousands of businesses together suffered multi-$million losses. The biggest of those losses were suffered by Nyrstar’s lead and zinc smelter at Port Pirie, BHP Billiton’s gold, copper and uranium mine at Olympic Dam, Oz Mineral’s Prominent Hill copper and goldmine and Arrium’s steel works at Whyalla: collectively, the losses suffered by SA’s miners and mineral processors are in the tens of $millions.

With litigators breathing down their necks, nervous wind power outfits are running confused and desperate interference over the (now, well-known) cause.

The situation has become so bad that some academics have concluded that it is time to shut down the UN’s out-of-control bureaucracies. A paper by Sonoma State University Professor Emeritus Jamal Munshi published by the Social Science Research Network, for example, makes a solid case for ditching the UN environmental bureaucracy. Under the headline “The United Nations: An Unconstrained Bureaucracy,” the June 2016 paper concludes that “unconstrained and undisciplined public sector bureaucracies do not serve the interest of the public” and that “such UN bureaucracies can safely be dismantled without any harm to the public interest.”

In a note to The New American, Professor Munshi said that “the case study is specific to the UNEP, however, the broader conclusion that we can draw from the UNEP case study is that a public sector entity without accountability and constraint and without adequate oversight and discipline mechanisms tends to serve itself and not the public.” That, he added, “would apply to the whole of the UN.”

Warm weather – time for an ice cream perhaps. Or maybe a law suit? [image credit: RSPB]

Take an unproven theory, pretend it’s the law, and sue any group that even appears to question it. What could possibly be wrong with that? Er…quite a lot really.
H/T Climate Home – climate change news

Governments will face rising demands for climate compensation unless they crack down on coal, oil and gas companies operating within their authority.

That was the conclusion of a report by Australia-based NGO the Climate Justice Programme on Tuesday. Victims of global warming such as citizens from small island states will increasingly look for redress in the courts, it warned. The scale of damages could dwarf previous mass actions like those against tobacco and asbestos companies.

Political battle lines seem to be being drawn over the attempt by some US Attorney Generals to use legal pressure to harass and intimidate perceived dissenters from climate change orthodoxy, whatever that may be.
H/T GWPF / Washington Times

The 17 attorneys general pursuing climate change dissenters for accusations of “fraud” want House Republicans to mind their own business. That’s not going to happen.

How a court is supposed to figure out what is just or unjust in climate matters is an interesting question, but it’s going to happen anyway as Yahoo News reports. There will probably be a new US president before all the legal battles are over.

MICHAEL BIESECKER May 17, 2016 WASHINGTON (AP) — The full appeals court in Washington will hear arguments in the legal fight over President Barack Obama’s plan to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, potentially accelerating the case’s path to the Supreme Court.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order Monday scheduling oral arguments on the legality of the Clean Power Plan for September 27.

– Today the public came one big step closer to learning the truth behind how university professors launched “a national campaign” to have state attorneys general investigate and prosecute political opponents under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) — investigations which have now swept up think tanks and climate scientists who have dared challenge the climate agenda and claims made to force it into place.

Representing Christopher Horner and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, attorneys from the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic successfully argued that the public records of Professor Edward Maibach should now be disclosed to all, having previously been submitted to the court under a protective order.

Another setback for fear-and-doubt merchants with this legal victory for shale gas development, as Somewhat Reasonable reports. Lack of evidence perhaps?

On Monday, May 2 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on what the New York Times (NYT) called: “a lengthy battle for energy production.” The court’s unanimous decision to strike down two cities’ limits on fracking is a victory for oil-and-gas companies and a “disappointment” to anti-fossil-fuel activists.

Several states, including Colorado’s neighbors, New Mexico and Texas, have faced similar anti-oil-and-gas initiatives that have also been shot down.

This could be yet another spanner in the works for the tottering nuclear power project that Britain’s political leaders seem so keen on. On the other hand a negative view from Greenpeace of nuclear power is no surprise.
H/T Power Engineering International

Legal opinion commissioned by Greenpeace suggests that any French government financial support to EDF to enable the company to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in the UK would almost certainly be blocked by the European Commission.

The legal viewpoint is that the commission would not agree to government assistance as it would constitute a breach of state aid guidelines.

If it gets approved, this looks a lot like an onshore ban in practice if not in name.
H/T PEI

A new bill submitted to Poland’s parliament threatens the very survival of the wind energy industry in the country.

The bill will make it illegal to build wind turbines within 2km of other buildings or forests — a measure campaigners said would rule out 99 per cent of land — and quadruple the rate of tax payable on existing turbines — making most unprofitable.

We have watched bemused at the twists and turns. An MEP is caught speeding on his way back from Brussels, starting a train of events. This black barrister/judge, much had been made of that as new in England, was friends with one of both of the Huhne’s. As a judge at a case over perverting the course, Bricoe was suddenly arrested by the police… I didn’t know why. Seems an eagle eye spotted Bricoe altering court submissions in favour of one of the accused!

Briscoe disbarred for role in Huhne speeding points scandal

15 April 2016 By Chloe Smith

A barrister and former part-time judge was today disbarred for ‘persistent dishonesty’ in what may be the final judicial act in the Huhne/Pryce speeding points scandal.

The bar disciplinary tribunal found that Constance Briscoe (pictured) had engaged in conduct which was dishonest and discreditable to a barrister, prejudicial to the administration of justice and likely to diminish public confidence in the legal profession or administration of justice.

The ‘climate wars’ take another twist with a new legal fund being set up to help counter threats from supporters of ‘official’ climate science, as the GWPF reports.

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin.

As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy.

Another attempted US ‘climate cover-up’ has run into legal opposition, as the GWPF reports. This time it’s the ‘more warmth causes more cold’ argument in the firing line. If there’s nothing to hide surely there’s no need to fight?

On January 8, 2014, the White House posted a controversial video claiming that global warming causes more severe winter cold. Called “The Polar Vortex Explained in 2 Minutes,” it featured the director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), claiming that a “growing body of evidence” showed that the “extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States” at the time was “a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”

James Delingpole finds that there could soon be a crime called ‘climate change denial’ in the US, if authorities so determine. Wasn’t America supposed to be the land of the free?

The US Department of Justice has been considering whether people should be prosecuted for the offense of climate change denial. “This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch, responding to a question from green activist Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) at a Senate Judiciary Hearing.

For a time I was an active member of Friends of the Earth and supported all they did. I then moved house and job and my membership lapsed. That is something I regretted as I felt I should be do more for the environment and that Friends of the Earth was one of the best organisations doing that.

That remained the case until March 2014 when I went to a meeting organised by RAFF (Residents against Fracking; Fylde) at Inskip (10 miles from Preston). I was unimpressed with the low level of accuracy in the presentation. i challenged some of this and to my surprise the local FoE activist supported the speaker in the inaccuracies. In two minutes my respect for FoE evaporated. RAFF also handed out a leaflet Shale Gas; the Facts which they withdrew after a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority.

The GWPF reports: The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that it is suing the Obama administration to obtain the same internal communications of federal scientists sought by a House committee in a dispute over global warming research.

The group said in a news release that it filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington on Dec. 2 against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seeking the agency’s “methodology for collecting and interpreting data used in climate models.”

Greenpeace, in furtherance of what is in effect its war against every species on the planet, has now turned to what, on the face of things, looks to me like outright breach of the RICO, wire-fraud, witness-tampering and obstruction-of-committee statutes. I have called in the FBI.

Greenpeace appears to have subjected Dr Will Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, to a maladroit attempt at entrapment that has badly backfired on it.

The organization I founded has become a monster. When I was a member of its central committee in the early days, we campaigned – usually with success – on genuine environmental issues such as atmospheric nuclear tests, whaling and seal-clubbing.

When Greenpeace turned anti-science by campaigning against chlorine (imagine the sheer stupidity of campaigning against one of the elements in the periodic table), I decided that it had lost its purpose and that, having achieved its original objectives, had turned to extremism to try to justify its continued existence.